Introduction

Data and Analysis

Juvenile Hare Initial Investigation

Annual juvenile hare trap counts

Figure 1: Annual juvenile hare trap counts-

The data visualization clearly shows that there is a huge variation between years in the number of juvenile hares that were collected. The max was 126 and the minimum was 2, excluding the years there were no data. In general, there is a larger number of hares collected in the first few years of the study than in the last part. The mean number of juvenile hares trapped over the 13 year period is 31.5 while the median is only 18.5. In moving forward, I would make sure that the people collecting data know that it is crucial to have uniform sampling effort from year to year. This means sampling at similar times each month with the same amount of traps set and the same amount of days. If the effort varies from year to year, the data will no longer reflect actual sample size.

Visulize juvenile hare weights

Figure 2: Weight observations for juvenile hares taken at 3 different sites. The sites include a mature lowland black spruce stand (Black Spruce), stands of mature white spruce, paper birch, and alder, as well as black spruce (Mature), and flood zone along the Tanana River (Riparian). Females are represented by the coral points and male represented by blue. Hares trapped, but with no sex, are represented as gray points. Weight is measured in grams.

This graph displays the distribution of hare weight according to sex and site. It can be observed that there were a lot more hares trapped in the riparian site than the other two sites.

Juvenile Weight Comparison (Male and Female snowshoe hare)

Table 1: Summary Statistics for male and female hares captured from 1999-2012
Sex Mean weight (g) Standard deviation (g) Sample size
female 855.39 292.25 200
male 945.86 333.22 163 

## 
## Cohen's d
## 
## d estimate: 0.2904674 (small)
## 95 percent confidence interval:
##      lower      upper 
## 0.08115207 0.49978274